Abductors who take control of a plane often force it to a destination other than its intended one and hold the passengers hostage there.

The Bhagavad-gita (02.44) uses the pregnant word abduction to convey how we are diverted and entrapped by desires for worldly enjoyment. Significantly, the desires that abduct us aren’t always immoral desires, just as all abductors don’t necessarily look like criminals. Like abductors who don respectable garbs, some abducting desires don a pious garb. The desire to religiously enjoy life’s good things – property, power and prestige – can tempt us away from life’s best thing: eternal love for God. We are at our core souls who have gone through many lifetimes in sub-human species. Now, we have finally got the human body, which allows the developed consciousness to perceive and pursue eternal happiness. But we get distracted from destination eternity by the respectable-seeming desire for religious piety.

Pertinently, the Gita discusses people who practice mundane religious rituals and rise to heaven (09.20). But once their pious credits are exhausted, they fall back to earth. If they are again tempted by the good life of material piety, they gradually rise to heaven again and eventually fall back to earth again. Thus, they stay in the cycle of birth and death, lifetime after lifetime. (09.21)

For us eternal beings, any desire for anything less than the eternal is a small desire. Whenever such small desires start captivating us, Gita wisdom helps us see those desires as abductors. Further, we see those desires as small desires by practicing bhakti-yoga diligently and glimpsing the big, indeed, infinite, happiness that comes by connecting with God, Krishna, the reservoir of all pleasure. That devotional connection gradually raises us to spiritual consciousness, thereby liberating us from all worldly desires, impious and pious.

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